1m2aSandbox

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve read a few really inspiring blogs by other moms and I finally just need to share them with you guys. Seriously good stuff.

First, The Problem With Being Supermom and How To Fix It at Inspired Action. Her opening sentence struck a deep chord with me:

“I’ve finally realized why it is I try to be Supermom. It’s because I can’t decide what is most important so I just try to do it all…which is impossible and leaves me feeling defeated. Rinse. Repeat.

Maddie sucks her thumb. She’s done it her whole life, and when she was a baby and we were excited when she did, since it meant she didn’t wake up in the middle of the night when her pacifier fell out of her mouth. Oh, sure, we knew we’d pay for it later, but we were so exhausted then we couldn’t do anything but rejoice and sign the credit card slip.

Fast forward almost eight years.

To be fair, Maddie’s not a bad thumb-sucker: she only does it when she’s holding her lovey, which has been restricted to her room. And though she does it to fall asleep, it pops out of her mouth immediately. So we’ve been able to skate by pretty well with the dentist, who’s always said, “No rush. She’s fine. Let’s talk again in six months.”

Second grade is the first year Maddie’s had “real” homework every night, and in the beginning it took some getting used to. Every night she has twenty minutes of reading, twenty minutes of some kind of math, and something “extra” – a website assignment, or a worksheet, or a long-term project or something of that ilk. I think it’s partly to get the parents and kids trained and ready when everything gets kicked up a notch in third grade.

Reading every night has been easy: the teacher says “do whatever” and I just let Maddie pick and am responsible for simply logging in her hours. And hours. And hours. For math, I’ve spent most of the year thinking it’s the same thing – “Do whatever, lady! Just get your kid used to thinking in a ‘math-y’ way for twenty minutes each night!” So we’d gone all over the map with math.

You see, Maddie enjoys math, but doesn’t like the tedium of memorization or practice – she likes the figuring-out-new-concepts thing. So we’ve covered long division and multiplication and percentages and fractions and negative numbers and . . . you get the picture.

Saturday afternoon the girls and I were enjoying glorious spring weather playing outside on the street of our cul de sac. Maddie was zooming around on her bike while Cora scootered happily along, me admiring various tricks and occasionally pulling weeds from the front lawn.

After a while Maddie became restless and asked if she could bike by herself for a while. Now, I have never let Maddie go off for a bike ride before: she doesn’t even walk the half-mile to school alone. Mama’s not quite ready, I guess.

But I could see in her eyes her longing to stretch her legs, so I said, “Tell you what. You can ride the two blocks to the park, ride around the blacktop a few times, then come back, ok?”

Maddie’s eyes lit up.